Key Takeaways (TLDR)
Topic: How to choose the right collaborators to increase your visibility, grow your business, and build lasting relationships as a small business owner.
What you’ll learn: Collaboration is one of the most powerful visibility strategies available to entrepreneurs, but who you collaborate with matters enormously. This post covers four reasons to collaborate, a broader-than-you-think list of what collaboration can actually look like, and five key factors to evaluate before saying yes to any collaborative project: shared vision, aligned values, communication compatibility, personality fit, and complementary skillsets. Includes a reflection framework with seven questions to assess past and future collaborations. Written from nearly a decade of firsthand experience as a small business owner and collaboration enthusiast.
Who this is for: Entrepreneurs, coaches, service providers, and small business owners who want to grow their visibility through strategic collaboration and are looking for a practical framework for choosing the right people to partner with.
Written by: Emily Aborn, NH Small Business Copywriter for home trade professionals, event planners, non-profits, podcasters, and small business owners. Host of the Small Business Casual Podcast.
Increase Your Visibility through Aligned Collaborations
From nearly a decade of being a small business owner, I’ve learned a lot about the potential of collaborating with others to increase your visibility.
My collaboration journey really started ramping up in 2017 when I was encouraged to stop isolating myself, and make connections in the business world.
If you haven’t heard the story, I owned a retail mattress store in New Hampshire, and I was a sad, little entrepreneur… working by my lonesome. I look happy in the picture, but on the inside, I was bored and uninspired.
In an effort to help me drum up some sales, increase visibility and ramp up business, a business advisor I was working with encouraged me to get out there and make some new connections and friends!
I took her advice and RAN with it – I attended every networking event I could get my butt to, met people on coffee dates, and collaborated with a lot of people.
It’s been upward, onward, and more aligned since!
I’ve put on events and workshops, done podcast interviews both as a guest and a host, run a book club, and more. As a copywriter, I’ve worked with Website Designers both for my clients and to brand my own business.
I’ve learned a lot about collaborating and how it can increase your visibility, and I want to share some of the reflections and lessons from it all.
What’s worked and what hasn’t, and how to leverage collaborations to increase your visibility, grow your business, and build lasting relationships.
4 Reasons to Collaborate
- It’s less lonely
- You’ll go further, faster when you go together
- Collaborating increases your visibility
- You meet new friends and faces
- It has the potential for a massive ripple effect
My hope is that this blog (and if you prefer listening, I did a whole podcast on this HERE) will help set you up for success moving forward in your own collaborations so you can seek out and find the right collaborators!
I also have entire playlist including interviews, and more on Collaborations HERE.
What are some examples of collaboration?
You probably think of a collaboration consisting of running an event together, starting a business with someone, or putting on a workshop together.
You’re right to think this, AND, collaboration can also come in the form of:
- Sharing a platform with someone
- Presenting / Speaking or being on a Summit or panel
- Being a part of or creating a business bundle
- Creating something entirely new that doesn’t exist yet
- Running a challenge together
- Cohosting a podcast
- Starting a book club or focus group
- Starting a Facebook community together
- Working with clients collaboratively
- Sponsoring events
- Being a guest/having a guest
One thing I want to help you realize, as it’s something I’m continuously learning too: who you choose to collaborate with MATTERS.
Why?
- You’re giving someone access to your energy, brains, talents, and skillset, and they need to respect and value that as much as you respect and value theirs.
- Secondly, it’s a reflection on you. When you choose to collaborate with someone, you’re giving access to the people YOU’VE spent time building that know, like, and trust factor with.
It’s not to be taken lightly or for granted, and if I’m honest, I’ve had many times in my business that I’ve taken it far less seriously than I should have when choosing collaborators.
When it goes well, it ripples out abundance, growth, inspiration, visibility, and more!
And when it goes bad, it can do damage to hearts, minds, friendships, and communities.
How to Choose Great Collaborators:
SHARED VISION / EXPECTATIONS
You need to have a shared vision and know what’s expected of one another. Every project doesn’t need to have some deep existential reason for existing, but often, even with a podcast episode, you’ll find that many hosts sit down with you for a few minutes before an interview and say, “This is what I’m hoping for, what are you hoping for in this conversation?” The clearer the expectations are up front, the better off your collaboration will be. Aligning on the desired outcome will create a far better experience. It also helps you get clear on what’s most important.
VALUES
I don’t think you’re going to get the chance to hash out someone’s values every time you hop on their podcast or go LIVE with them. Some of this comes down to researching and learning more about the person you’re collaborating with prior to if this is something important and significant to you. Someone’s values can be so DIFFERENT from yours that you end up compromising what’s important to you – or acting hypocritical to your belief system or feeling like what you think/feel isn’t valid or important.
Your values can get trampled if you’re not both upfront about them. Depending on how deep the collaboration is, I think it’s important to bring this up.
COMMUNICATION
You need to be able to speak up when collaboration is starting to veer off or when you’re doing most of the work, or you feel like the other person is and you need to know how to help. Communicating strengths, weaknesses, expectations, and progress is KEY. Respecting and compromising on how you communicate is also important.
PERSONALITY and MODUS OPERANDI
Personality also feeds a bit into characteristics in a person such as commitment and work ethic, which can bring us to a sense of overall compatibility. Personality plays a huge role because it can be challenging to collaborate with someone you don’t jive with or feel connected to. It can also be hard when things like stubbornness, rigidity, overpowering or bossy tendencies come unleashed for either of you if it’s not in line with how the other person operates.
Other questions to ask are: is the person as committed as you? Are they flaky? Going to leave you holding the bag? Are they going to put in time and energy? You don’t want to be left putting someone’s name all over something you collaborated on – giving them exposure and visibility and then they cancel on you and you’re left to host the thing alone, set it up yourself, or clean up yourself.
SKILLSET
Sometimes you might want to supersize your existing skillset with collaboration that has similar strengths and other times, you might want to get someone who can balance out your weaknesses. I tend to love collaborating with people who have skills in areas. You are amazing at being YOU and doing what you do best! And someone else is amazing at being them and doing what they do best.
To wrap up, here are some questions to use when reflecting on your past collaborations and examining future ones to set yourself up for success:
- Do my collaborators line up with the vision I have for this project, event, and outcome? What do we each define as this being a success? What’s the gauge for how well it went?
- What are their values? What are their business values? Do they align with my values? What do I need to learn about them or myself before moving forward to make sure we’re aligned?
- Can I communicate openly and honestly with this person? How do I best like to communicate? How do they best like communicating? How frequently does each of us need to touch base?
- Do I like their personality? Do they like MINE!? Can I be myself with them?
- Do I like their modus operandi and how they conduct themselves in the world? Do they show up when they say they will? Do what they say they will do? How committed are they?
- What skills and strengths do they have I don’t? What strengths and skills do I have that they don’t? Where might there be gaps?
- Do they have access to people I want to be connecting with!? And vice versa?
Collaboration gives you access to audiences you haven’t built yet. When you partner with someone whose community trusts them, you’re essentially getting a warm introduction to a whole new group of potential clients, followers, and collaborators. Beyond visibility, it also combats the isolation that many small business owners feel, speeds up growth by combining strengths and networks, and creates a ripple effect of opportunities that can be hard to generate on your own.
More than most people realize. Yes, it includes co-hosting events, workshops, and podcast episodes. But it also includes being a guest on someone’s podcast or summit, participating in a business bundle, co-running a challenge, starting a book club or Facebook community together, sponsoring an event, or even just going live together on social media. Any time you’re sharing a platform, a project, or an audience with another person, that’s collaboration.
Look for alignment across five areas: shared vision and expectations for the project, compatible values, open communication, personality fit, and complementary skillsets. The clearest signal of a good collaborator is someone who shows up when they say they will, does what they committed to, and brings something to the table that you don’t already have. As a gut check, ask yourself whether you’d be comfortable putting your name and your audience behind whatever you’re creating together.
When collaboration goes wrong, it can damage more than just the project. It can affect friendships, communities, and your reputation with the audience you’ve worked hard to build trust with. Common pitfalls include misaligned expectations, one person doing the majority of the work, value conflicts that surface mid-project, and collaborators who don’t follow through on their commitments. Taking the time to vet a collaborator before saying yes is one of the most protective things you can do for your business.
A few questions worth sitting with: Does this person have access to the audience I want to be connecting with? Do our values and working styles align enough to get through the hard parts of a project together? Am I excited about this because it’s genuinely a good fit, or just because the opportunity feels flattering? And perhaps most importantly: can I communicate openly and honestly with this person if something goes sideways? If the answer to most of those is yes, it’s probably worth exploring further.
